Oh forgot to mention, they had an old Finnish radio RPG called Lohikäärmepuu ("Dragon tree") on exhibit too

anything with dragon in it is pretty great XD

Sadly no recordings but I think these play by phone and other unusual media (for RPG) are a really interesting niche to hear more about

I think there was a play-by-SMS MMORPG lurking around in the weird pages of teletext back in the early 2000's

Not sure how universal the teletext layout is but ours usually had news in pages 1XX, sports in 2XX, TV guide in 3XX, etc... and 8XX at latest was for various, usually third-party, mobile services like that.

hmm

I actually had to check, there's still one commercial TV network running teletext. The public broadcast company also does but they'll probably keep it up for at least as long as there are people who plausibly rely on it

It feels like a wasteland, but apparently the classifieds looking for casual hookups are alive and well

I don't watch much TV

Me neither, anymore

The teletext is like a dying media wrapped inside another dying media

XD

@BESW are you talking about changing the system preferences with: defaults write com.apple.sidecar.display allowAllDevices -bool YES ?

Modifying the system preferences is probably what I'd try and stop if it didn't work. There's a rabbit hole of patching Sidecar directly, but that seems like a bridge too far for getting a second little monitor.

You can always revert the settings changes to what they were beforehand.

@BESW This workaround changes three settings and seems sane enough.

@BlackSpike I'd say take a look at the SpringBoot community for java development in general. It's a web app framework, so you're going to get a lot of talk about http and javascript issues as well.

@GcL I'll take a glance at it

I struggle to find people to discuss things at my level (not a complete novice, but still lots to learn. Self-Taught, so have probably missed out some v important bits)

But it might coincide nicely with the UI elements. A long time a go in an optimistic time JavaFX was a promised replacement to Swing to allow write once deploy desktop, mobile, and web.

@BlackSpike I'd say "autodidact" instead of "self-taught". Just so someone will have to do a google search before dismissing you offhand.

@GcL :D

I find SO useful for hunting for technical answers, "how to write this bit of code", "what does this error mean, and how do i fix it" ... but not for discussing WHY I would use certain things, what structures fit best for my needs, etc

Looks like there's a few android dev discord servers. I haven't been on them myself, but I would assume they're going to be more Kotlin focused.

Yeah ... another language/framework to learn :(

@BlackSpike Those are hard questions to answer. What should I be doing and why? E.g. somebody used a HashMap for keeping track of some options and another person used two arrays and an index. I'd prefer the hashmap, but I can imagine reasons the array solution would be fine too.

@BlackSpike I think that's the one Google picked it as the blessed child going forward. I was just happy not to have 20 lines of boilerplate to get "hello world" to go.

@GcL yup. Which is why it would be nice to discuss it with people ... see what the pro's n cons are ... or I'll start using one way, realise it's not going to work, 1/2 way through my App, and have to rebuild ... again ...

@BlackSpike It's hard to discuss without being privy to the surrounding context is the issue. I could imagine both being fine. I'd recommend hashmap of the two, but there are some config libraries out there that might suit the needs even better.

I like hashmaps, but they don't always do what I want

Pair programming is usually pretty good for learning how another developer thinks about problems. I think VSCode has some nice pair programing capabilities. I don't know how popular that is with Kotlin devs. I'd expect more to use the JetBrains products and I don't think they facilitate remote pair programming very well.

My current project is the D&D Equipment Lists ... display by type, filters, properties etc

If you find someone interested in your projects, that might be a suggestion to make.

and speaking of RPGs ... my fellow players are starting to turn up ... Rolemaster tonight!

Pair Programming. Sounds interesting

OK, thanks. Got some ideas. Got to go. Game On soon :)

Ciao

@vicky_molokh sorry

@Gwideon For what?

it probably wasn't that good

I'm the one who's likely to say inappropriate stuff in the upcoming minutes.

okay

@Gwideon Don't look at it as not good. Look at it as an opportunity to make the ship come alive.

alright

OK, so, the questions that come to my mind:

okay hit me

- I'm a bit fuzzy on the ship's scale in other units - notably, mass and volume. Length alone can be misleading. Don't rush answering it, but it's useful to think about. It says that passengers-and-cargo '20', but it's not quite clear if that means 20 centners (so passenger seats) or 20 full-accommodation passengers (so full rooms with spare capacity etc.).

okay

- Speed and propulsion. It lists a top speed, but it's unclear whether it's meant to be the top speed in atmosphere, or something else? It seems very modest for a reaction-drive ship (those have speeds in kilometres per second).

Really, propulsion is probably the most greedy-for-thinking part of spaceship designs.

I was going off the cr90 never done this before really

Um, I'm not sure how to say it. I'm posting these questions in the hope that they'll help you make your ship great. I'm sorry if they come off as . . . not nice.

no it's fine

Also, I'm sorry, but I have no idea what CR90 is. I'm guessing something from Star Wars?

The blockade runner

starwars.fandom.com/wiki/CR90_corvette

A useful metric to also remember is the typical acceleration. It defines the maximum planetary gravity the ship can overcome (unless it's a winged one, then you get more leeway but get other issues).

true

It usually also gives an idea of the craft's manoeuvrability (less so in the Star Wars universe where spaceships do banking turns like air fighters).

As for Star Wars and ship speed, this is where I fear that my questions may end up unhelpful because, well, Star Wars seems to operate waaaay more on rule of cool than rules of logic and maths, so lots of numbers of canonical examples may blatantly not add up.

yeah

@Gwideon Are you more interested in replicating/homaging/etc. the SW style of write-ups, or making your own thing which is supposed to evoke a feeling of believability, or something else?

i'm not quite sure

The ship's for the setting you're making, right?

I guess I'm kinda going for a bit of starwars with a bit more believeability

- Star Wars pretends that interplanetary distances are the same as in our universe, which doesn't really work with WWI flight speeds in STL mode. A solution to that is to list three speeds: combat speed that can be achieved in the furball and with enemies in range; STL 'fast travel' or long cruise speed, which is higher, but can only be achieved when all nearby ships are friendly (maybe some sort of engine field sync to avoid interference), and finally the sustained hyperspace/FTL speed.

okay

those are some good questions to answer

@Gwideon Also, incidentally, since you seem to be making a setting that is inspired by SW but trying to be its own thing, I think you might be interested at looking at a worked example with commentary of another GM doing exactly that. Psi-Wars: Don't Convert, Create! is something of an introductory text of sorts.

The articles are geared to a system that is probably too crunch for how you want SWish stuff to be, but the overall principles and examples of examining and iterating through stuff should still be useful.

okay

Guess who's been reading data sheets for her new motherboard to try to figure out whether an M.2 SDD will steal bandwitch from the GPU or not!

←

(seriously, why is it this difficult to decipher....)

@Xirema I didn't even think to check that - why would it?

@NautArch Because some mobos, especially lower-end mobos, will share PCIe lanes across multiple connected devices. This was especially common during the SLI/Crossfire scam era, where two x16 devices would become the equivalent of 2x8 devices because the mobo only put enough space for 16 lanes total. That was more than half a decade ago though, not sure if that's still a common practice or not.

@Xirema Ha! It always felt like crossfire was a scam.

I'm debating getting a new GPU. Just finished mass effect 2 and going to start either REd Dead2 or or the new star wars game. Thinkikng maybe it's time.

@NautArch I mean, it wasn't, it's just that it was 2x expensive for what should have been a 2x performance improvement, but really never got to that point.

Turns out just putting two GPUs into your device and bridging them doesn't quite get them working like a seamless single unit. Who would have guessed.

On the plus side, it did give me an extra GPU to give to my younger sibling once they decided to build their own computer.

I should acknowledge that PCIe bandwidth is a big red herring when it comes to GPU (or any device) performance, since the maximum bandwidth is usually way higher than any device could ever actually use anyways. If your game is actually transferring 450Gb/s in textures at all times, the programmers have done something horrifically wrong.

Bandwidth really just means "badly optimized games will perform better".

Which isn't necessarily nothing: LOTS of games are badly optimized.

But there's really no excuse for any game to actually need that kind of transfer rate in the first place.

heh. I'm currently running a 750ti.

@NautArch That was an interesting card. Used the same chipset as the 9xx series, IIRC.

@Xirema yeah, it was a really good deal

i'm actually fairly happy with it and i'm not sure what i'd want to upgrade with.

Because I don't think spending a lot of money is really worth it.

@Xirema I had pretty good experiences with SLI in the past.

@GcL I can definitely report that SLI-ing together two GTX760s got me performance that was almost as good as the (equivalent in cost) GTX980 that I'm currently using.

I switched to monolithic cards as well, but mostly to simplify my builds. I wasn't writing and CUDA anymore so having an extra addressable card just didn't have the payout.

Ironically, I think I might have been more excited to have two graphics cards in my build when I wasn't using SLI, since OpenCL tends to behave itself much better when the device you're using isn't also distracted with regular rendering tasks.

@Xirema Headless is the way to go when you're working with code that wants to be scheduled on a gpu.

Boot to tty in my head always stands for "talk to you"

@GcL Yup.

@NautArch Nice nice. I have yet to play RDR2

@V2Blast I'd definitely be in on RDR2 if it was crossplay. But since it's not, i'm debating.